October 20 @ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Over the years, Vonnegut has said that the Billy Pilgrim character in his book “Slaughterhouse-Five” was based on a young Rochester, New York man who, like Vonnegut, served in the 106th Infantry, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and held as a POW in Dresden, Germany.Unlike Vonnegut, however, the real-life Edward R. Crone did not survive the war and, unlike Billy Pilgrim, he did not return to upstate New York to marry and raise a family.

During his lecture, Holcomb will discuss Crone’s early years in Rochester, his service during the war, his relationship to the character in the Vonnegut novel and how it took his parents five years after the war to locate their son’s body in order to bring him home for burial in Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery.